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Between the two world wars, American publishing entered a “golden age” characterized by an explosion of new publishers, authors, audiences, distribution strategies, and marketing techniques. The period was distinguished by a diverse literary culture, ranging from modern cultural rebels to working-class laborers, political radicals, and progressive housewives. In America the Middlebrow, Jaime Harker focuses on one neglected mode of authorship in the interwar period—women's middlebrow authorship and its intersection with progressive politics. 

With the rise of middlebrow institutions and readers came the need for the creation of the new category of authorship. Harker contends that these new writers appropriated and adapted a larger tradition of women's activism and literary activity to their own needs and practices. Like sentimental women writers and readers of the 1850s, these authors saw fiction as a means of reforming and transforming society. Like their Progressive Era forebears, they replaced religious icons with nationalistic images of progress and pragmatic ideology. In the interwar period, this mode of authorship was informed by Deweyan pragmatist aesthetics, which insisted that art provided vicarious experience that could help create humane, democratic societies.

Drawing on letters from publishers, editors, agents, and authors, America the Middlebrow traces four key moments in this distinctive culture of letters through the careers of Dorothy Canfield, Jessie Fauset, Pearl Buck, and Josephine Herbst. Both an exploration of a virtually invisible culture of letters and a challenge to monolithic paradigms of modernism, the book offers fresh insight into the ongoing tradition of political domestic fiction that flourished between the wars.

WINNER OF THE ALBERT J. BEVERIDGE AWARD OF THE AMERICAN HISTORICAL ASSOCIATION

A classic study of race, reform, and political change in the New South.

Populism to Progressivism in Alabama by Sheldon Hackney is a landmark study of the political and social transformation of Alabama during the pivotal years between 1890 and 1910. Widely recognized as a classic work of Southern history, the book examines the rise of the Populist movement, the emergence of Progressive reform, and the forces that reshaped political power in the state at the turn of the twentieth century.

Hackney explores the complex relationships among race, class, economic change, agrarian protest, and democratic participation. He investigates how farmers, laborers, political leaders, and reformers responded to industrialization, shifting economic conditions, and the challenges of governance in the New South. Central to the narrative are debates over voting rights, disfranchisement, race relations, and the creation of new political institutions that would shape Alabama's future for generations.

Combining quantitative methods with traditional historical scholarship, Hackney provides a nuanced interpretation of both Populism and Progressivism, challenging simplistic accounts of reform and political change. Essential reading for understanding Alabama and the modern South, this influential volume remains a foundational resource for historians, political scientists, students, and anyone interested in the history of American democracy and regional transformation.